


The typology of storytelling

by Metabird (wheatear)



Series: Approaches to storytelling [9]
Category: His Dark Materials (TV), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Multi-Fandom
Genre: Approaches to Storytelling, Compare and Contrast, Essays, Gen, His Dark Materials Season 1 Spoilers, Meta, Nonfiction, References to Multiple Fandoms, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Writing, adaptations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-12 23:16:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23139286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheatear/pseuds/Metabird
Summary: Character or idea? Discovery or construction? A meta commentary contrasting different approaches to storytelling.Part one looks at writing as discovery vs writing as construction.Part two looks at character-led vs ideas-led storytelling.
Series: Approaches to storytelling [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1653421
Comments: 8
Kudos: 3
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	1. Writing as discovery vs writing as construction

**Author's Note:**

> All credit for the inspiration for this meta goes to [this post](https://nestofstraightlines.tumblr.com/post/189511272936/the-d%C3%A6mon-cages) on tumblr. It talks about the His Dark Materials TV series which is what I start off discussing too in this first part, before moving on to a more general commentary on different approaches to writing.
> 
> A note about the title: This was originally two different posts on Dreamwidth that I'm now cross-posting here so I didn't have a title to cover both parts but it occurred to me when rereading them that you could draw a parallel between these different approaches and Myers-Briggs typology i.e. discovery vs construction is P vs J, character-led vs ideas-led is F (people!) vs NT (concepts!). But I don't talk about typology in the actual posts so if that's all nonsense to you, don't worry, you don't have to be familiar with typology to read this.

Having watched the first season of the _His Dark Materials_ TV series it's clear that the TV show is taking a very different approach to adapting the material compared to the books. I read this [fascinating post](https://nestofstraightlines.tumblr.com/post/189511272936/the-d%C3%A6mon-cages) on tumblr which does a great job of explaining why and how the TV show's approach to storytelling makes for some strong character work and individual scenes, but is less successful at landing its bigger themes. It talks about how the HDM books are ideas-led, but the show is character-led.  
  
But that's not the only difference. Pullman takes a discovery-based approach to writing i.e. he uncovers the story as he writes it. The showrunners on the other hand have the benefit of having all the source material of the original trilogy available to them, and so they made the decision not only to tell the story of the first book but to lay the groundwork for the entire series over eight episodes. In other words, the show's approach is **a complete mismatch** to the way Pullman wrote the books.  
  
It's not that one particular approach is better than any other: I think they can all work depending on the story you're writing. The problem is that the TV show creators are adapting an existing work, and by taking a completely contradictory approach to the books, the flaws of that approach are being exposed and the strengths of that approach are not best served by the source material. (Great, intimate character work is not what I read HDM for. I read HDM for the big philosophical ideas and themes, and that's the weakest part of the adaptation which consequently means that the book's most powerful scenes have so far fallen flat in the show.)  
  
This is why I feel torn over the show's decision to bring in elements of _The Subtle Knife_ early and lay the groundwork for the whole series. On the one hand, this has brought us some great individual scenes. (I have greatly enjoyed Lord Boreal's adventures in our world.) On the other hand, I basically spent the first three episodes going, okay, this is set-up, cool, looking forward to the pay-off and even after five episodes I still felt like a lot of it is set-up as opposed to the story existing in that moment. I think it doesn't help that I know the books so in every single scene and character beat I can see exactly what is being set up and how: I can _see_ the story being constructed in the writing as I watch. It's like watching someone build a house. That might be interesting to some degree, but you don't really want to be watching a construction site, do you, you want to get to the tour of that finished house and go ooh as you explore it.  
  
Look at episode 5. Taken individually, the scenes with Will and his mother are very strong and do a great job of introducing the character. And there was a lot I liked about Lyra's developing relationship with the gyptians, Lee and Iorek as well. But even within a single episode, it felt like so much painstaking set-up (weren't there three different scenes of Lyra wanting to search for the ghost the alethiometer told her about?) for comparatively little pay-off. I expected the show to do a far better job than the film with Billy losing his daemon and amazingly it didn't: it got the tragedy, but was only able to really show it once Billy had died and the other characters were mourning at his funeral pyre; it missed on delivering the horror of severing a child's daemon which was the most important thing that episode needed to do. The other problem as I see it is that introducing Will's storyline here actually distracts from the immersion into Lyra's world: you have to be in a certain frame of mind to buy into Lyra's fantasy world particularly when it's trying to convey a concept that has no direct equivalent in our world, and so switching between the "real" world and this other fantastical one I think made Lyra's world seem more unreal and perhaps harder to connect with.  
  
But moving on. Let's talk about **writing as discovery** vs **writing as construction** in a more general sense. 

**Writing as discovery** means uncovering the story as you write rather than planning the plot from the start. It doesn't mean you know nothing, I'm sure even the most free-spirited writers must have some sense of what they want to do (right?), but the point is that it's open-ended. The mythology isn't fixed or complete: it's created, embellished and altered as the story is written. **Writing as construction** means creating a structure for your story so that you have a plan and then in the writing you execute that plan. It doesn't mean you know everything that's going to happen or that you can't adjust the plan or add in new developments as you go along, but you have a sense of where you're going and you build the plot around achieving that.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of writing by construction vs writing by discovery? I would say that the great advantage of a construction-based approach is **coherence**. If it's done well, it's like a meticulously crafted puzzle box with lots of different moving parts that all come together in a satisfying way. You can gradually build complexity and layer in character relationships and plot developments to create anticipation, tension, conflict, all that good stuff. A strong example of this kind of story will feel tightly plotted, focused, with plot twists and resolutions that are surprising but feel earned, and strong character arcs. (I watched _The Dark Knight Rises_ recently and found myself admiring just how tightly constructed that film is despite its length: not a single beat is wasted. It knows exactly what story it wants to tell and it does it with great efficiency.)  
  
The drawback of this approach is that it can feel **mechanical** or plodding. Like I said earlier, it can feel like a lot of set-up and moving parts where you're waiting to get to the good bits rather than being fully engaged in the scene as written. It might be reluctant to introduce new ideas that weren't set up earlier. It can also sacrifice character for plot or idea/theme. If the focus is all about the plot, it might miss out on those humanizing moments that make us engage with the characters as people. If the focus is all about the idea or theme, the characters might be more like symbols or archetypes than actual people.   
  
As for a discovery-based approach, the great advantage of this is **immersion**. It can really feel like you're right there on the journey with the author and you're uncovering more of this world and these characters as you go. This also means it has a greater capacity to surprise. It can be more wildly inventive and free, because the story goes where it goes and that could take you to a completely different place by the end compared to where you were at the start. Whereas a construction-based writer is locked in and limited in their choices because they know where they're getting to from the beginning, a discovery-based writer can uncover new and interesting avenues to explore unfettered by a railroading plot. The best type of this writing makes this feel completely natural.  
  
The disadvantage of course is that it can feel **loose** or like the writer is jumping from plot point to plot point without knowing what they're doing. Or they can bite off more than they can chew: introduce lots of ideas, characters, subplots etc, with no plan for how to wrap them up, and then get bogged down in their own mythology. There's a risk of subplots being dropped or even retconned, or inconsistencies creeping in. Basically, anything that makes it obvious that the writer didn't have a plan. The plot may feel meandering, the new ideas and plot twists thrown in may or may not stick.  
  
With a really good story, you may have no idea where the writer falls on the discovery vs construction spectrum, because a strong writer will disguise all that. The artifice of construction will feel like it naturally flows from the characters' situation; the wildness of discovery will come together in a way that feels completely earned as if it were planned from the start.  
  
I'm interested to hear your take on this, especially if you're a writer yourself! Where do you fall on these different spectrums? Or, thinking about the fandoms you're in, what approaches do those canons take? Do you have a preference for one or the other?


	2. Character-led vs ideas-led storytelling

Last time I talked briefly about a **character-led vs ideas-led approach to storytelling**. This post is going to be all about that, with some discussion of different examples and how and why they fall into that category.  
  
Definitions  
A **character-led** story focuses on the characters in their own right. It's all about the human drama and those individual moments or details that bring the characters' world to life. The plot and setting are created in service of the characters and developing the relationships between them. An **ideas-led** story uses the characters as a vehicle to explore a theme or idea. The plot therefore takes priority over the characters, and what happens in the plot is in service of further exploring that idea.  
  
The easiest way to distinguish between the two is to ask yourself: is there something else this story cares about more than the characters?  
  
**Character-led**  
Examples:  
The Borgias, Downton Abbey, Fleabag, Frozen, Harry Potter, Jessica Jones, Killing Eve, Lord of the Rings, Merlin, Misfits, The Originals, Outlander, Poldark, Pride and Prejudice, Rome, Sherlock, The Vampire Diaries  
  
Character-led stories are of course all about people and you can see that reflected even just looking at the list here. The title is often the name of the protagonist (6 on this list) or refers to the main characters: _Outlander_ and _Fleabag_ is an alternative name for the protagonist, _The Borgias_ and _The Originals_ refer to the family at the centre of the show, _Misfits_ is about a crew of, yep, misfits, and the _Lord of the Rings_ is the antagonist.  
  
Two of the titles refer to the setting: _Downton Abbey_ and _Rome_, indicating that the show is about an ensemble cast. These are both historical shows. It's no surprise to me that period dramas feature so much on this list: history is about people. _Pride and Prejudice_ is an example where the title refers to the relationship between the characters. (Obviously it wasn't historical when it was written! But what we now call period drama is typically character-led. Ideas-led classical fiction tends to get categorized elsewhere e.g. _Frankenstein_.)  
  
And that accounts for all the examples above except two: _Frozen_ and _The Vampire Diaries_. _Frozen_ sounds like maybe it could refer to something more ideas-based, but it's conceptually weak (compare e.g. _Inside Out_ or _Zootopia_) and really it's another setting-based title, just with more adjective flavour. _The Vampire Diaries_ similarly is a slightly more oblique way of referring to the protagonists: they're vampires who write diaries! And humans who write about vampires in their diaries! As the word "diary" suggests, it's all about the interpersonal drama.  
  
**Ideas as a catalyst for drama**  
The ideas in these stories aren't there for their own sake, they're used as a means to an end to further the character drama. My favourite example of this is _The Vampire Diaries_ which is jam-packed with concepts that are right up my alley (mind control! doppelgangers! ethical dilemmas!) and uses 100% of them to again ask the question: Which Salvatore brother should Elena be boning?  
  
Or a typical pattern with historical dramas is to use big historical events as a backdrop and catalyst for human drama. _Rome_ is a great example of this. It's the characters within that setting that bring it to life and make us care about the history unfolding on screen.  
  
But the award for most character-driven story on this list goes to _Outlander_, for its merry slapdash approach to worldbuilding (the time travelling stones don't matter in the slightest except as a means to bring Claire and Jamie together or to drive them tragically apart), its use of not one but two historical time periods as window dressing for Claire's relationship and family drama, and piling on all the trauma it possibly can to make the characters comforting one another all the sweeter.  
  
The most important thing a character-driven story has to do, obviously, is to get you invested in the characters. If you care about them, everything else follows. The canons on this list that I got really invested in had that magical combination of characters and relationships that I cared about plus themes that I'm interested in even if they weren't the point of the story.  
  
**Ideas-led**  
Examples:  
Battlestar Galactica, Being Human, Black Mirror, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Chronicles of Narnia, Doctor Who, Dollhouse, Game of Thrones, The Good Place, The Handmaid's Tale, His Dark Materials, Inception, Life on Mars, The Matrix, Orphan Black, Utopia, Westworld  
  
Many of the ideas-led stories either state the central idea outright or refer to it in their title. The most obvious example is _Being Human_ which is about, you guessed it, being human. A+ title, solid work there.  
  
Other titles do similar work: _Black Mirror_ is about reflecting the dark side of human nature through technology (get it? it's your blank phone screen staring back at you), _Crazy Ex-Girlfriend_ is about deconstructing the very concept of a crazy ex-girlfriend, _Game of Thrones_ is about power, _The Good Place_ is about moral philosophy (how do we make the world we live in "the good place"?), and so on.  
  
Don't ask me what _Orphan Black_ means because I still don't know but the show is about identity and nature vs nurture. Other more oblique or symbolic titles include _His Dark Materials_ which is a reference to Paradise Lost and the retelling of the Fall, _Dollhouse_ which is about personhood (are the Dolls people in their own right? should they have rights? what about the original person occupying that head? The premise lends itself to so many great questions), _Inception_ which refers to a fictional concept within the movie itself (bold choice there), _Life on Mars_ which asks the existential questions ("am I dead, in a coma, or back in time?") and _The Matrix_ (is our reality real?).  
  
_Doctor Who_ is perhaps symbolic in that the title itself should be a question but we don't really know what the question is or what the answer might be. It uses its immense freedom of premise (anywhere in time or space!) to explore a different idea every week.  
  
Finally, we have setting-based titles where the world itself is used to explore an idea: _Battlestar Galactica_ is a ship acting as the cradle for all of humanity and the basis from which the show ponders its ideas on the nature of humanity and human society. _Chronicles of Narnia_ uses its fantastical setting to convey religious truth. _Westworld_ is about the nature of storytelling, hence the title which refers to the constructed fictional world within its constructed fictional world.  
  
**Sacrificing character for idea**  
When it comes right down to it, an ideas-led story will sacrifice character for the sake of the idea. The clearest example on this list is _Dollhouse_, where the protagonist literally loses her character to become the embodiment of the central idea. Echo is the idea. The character of Caroline is underdeveloped and nowhere near as important.  
  
You can also see this in _Doctor Who_'s revolving cast of characters - none of them are bigger than the central conceit.  
  
More controversially, you see it in the ending of _Battlestar Galactica_ where the symbolism and meaning that the writers wanted to convey takes precedent over the human drama.  
  
The most ideas-driven canon on this list is _Black Mirror_, which is after all an anthology series so there is no character continuity. The structure of the show itself is conceptual, linked together by theme rather than character. The idea for each episode comes first; the characters are created the way they are to explore that idea.  
  
So for an ideas-led story the symbolic meaning of and the role that the characters play within the overarching story is more important than the characters themselves. This can mean that characters get squashed into roles that maybe aren't the most realistic fit (_Black Mirror_ avoids this by building its world from scratch every time), but that's not the point. What I look for with canons like these is thematic coherence. Does it still have interesting things to say about its central theme two or three seasons on? What happens to the characters in the end matters less than what that means for the theme and overall message of the story.


End file.
